Monday, September 5, 2011

Food: Two Fatty Seafood Restaurant @ SS2, PJ

It was my 23rd birthday several weeks back (in fact, a month ago - that's how delayed this post is!) and Dad decided to ship the entire family out for a good old tasty Chinese dinner. My birthday's actually pretty special especially if you're into auspicious feng shui stuff and the whole shebang - 8/8/88 - and I suspect that's the reason why Dad can remember it without any problems at all. (Mum is usually the one who keeps track of birthdays, you see :p)

Well, being in pretty much the centre of SS2 with Chinese food galore prescribes that my family doesn't usually travel far for food and that's how we ended up a stone's throw away at Cheow Yang.

Photo credit to: www.twofattyseafood.com

Two Fatty Seafood has been quite a staple in that area and we've even been here before for my grandmother's birthday. It's affordable and tasty Chinese fare that we enjoy, and I guess a lot of other people enjoy as well because its always packed to the brim with large Chinese families. Dad was told that they've recently changed chef(s) (I'm not quite sure on the details, so don't quote me on this) so he decided to try it out.

My large Chinese family minus the older children (who think it's uncool to be seen on blogs & Facebook :p)

Adam & I.

Adam has never been here before so it was a good chance for us to taste some of their stuff together as well. :)

We started off dinner with a Two Season Combination consisting of hot deep fried bacon rolled with long beans, and cold salad prawns. Things certainly got off to a good start here! The bacon roll, coated with a thin layer of batter, was unique and somehow addictive. Who would have thought the fragrant steaks of bacon would compliment juicy, crunchy long beans so well? The prawns were just as good, fresh and springy, served with fruit salad.

As with all Chinese set dinners, dish #2 will undoubtedly be Shark's Fin Soup or some reincarnation of it. The broth was flavourful and less starchy than usual, which I liked.

I'm not much for Shark's Fin soup, so I do like it when there are some other ingredients as well - the juicily sweet crab slivers and crunchy water chestnuts bits made my soup better. :)

I'm awful with fish names and can't usually tell one fish from another (unless it's the obvious ones like salmon, or cod) but this was one of those freshwater fishes with heaps of small, fine, tiny Y-shaped bones in the flesh. The sauce was tasty, full of mushrooms and went well with the fresh flesh of the fish, but it sure was troublesome weeding out all those tiny bones!

The Roast Chicken with Garlic was tender in all the right places, crispy in others and came generously sprinkled with fragrant fried garlic. My family enjoyed this variation, but give me the usual plum sauce with my Chinese roast chicken any day. (Which we did ask for after half the chicken was gone :D)

The Claypot Pork Belly followed suit, making all the men in my family order rice. Steaming and smouldering with heat, the pork belly slices were tender and tasty, albeit a little too much on the fatty side for my liking. That aside, the sweet sauce and meat went brilliantly with white rice.

I think my only problem with Two Fatty Seafood is that it's somewhere in between of a dine-pay-dash tai chow place and a more upper class Chinese Tai Thong-ish restaurant because even though the food is easy on the wallet and good at the same time, the dishes are served one after another. Sloooooowly.

A bit of background here: My immediate family's pretty big (9 adults and Adam makes it 10 now, and 6 children) and we're usually used to fighting for our food so family dinners are a kiasu gulping affair :p

So when food comes so slowly, everyone kinda gets bored or remains very hungry and when the next dish comes, everyone pounces!

I couldn't even snap a picture of the vegetables without chopsticks already attacking.

Anyway, the vegetables ("ching chow" style - which pretty much means au naturale in Chinese restaurant terms, wok-fried with just a little bit of garlic) were fresh enough for my liking, crunchy and juicy stems, although Adam insists that they might have been too "old".

And as always, Sau Meen Noodles are a must. "Sau meen" or longevity noodles, to symbolise long life, is something my dad always insists on at birthdays. The noodles here were tasty, but nothing spectacular. The egg noodles were springy and there was certainly no shortage of the mushrooms or ham that made the dish even tastier.

Because there's so much time in between dishes, the kids table finished eating way ahead of the adults and so the younger kids run around insisting on taking pictures to keep themselves occupied! Here's Adam and my 6 year old niece, Amelia.

Finally! Dinner was rounded up with this - glutinous rice balls coated with roasted sesame seeds and an explosion of black sesame waiting to happen as you take your first bite.

I've had this before and it was so good then that we were at war for the last few pieces (the children even ordered another plate and kept a watchful eye on the kitchen so they could grab 'em before it was served to our table!). However, they were a bit disappointing this time; still good, but not as soft and full as before.

It was a thoroughly satisfying dinner at Two Fatty Seafood that night and a great way to celebrate my 23rd, amongst family. We were definitely taken aback with how satisfied we were with the taste and quality of the food for the price we paid (roughly about RM 220 for all these dishes above, excluding the kids' food which I didn't review) and there was no ajinomoto tell-tale thirst that came after dinner that you usually get if lots of artificial flavouring was used. Although the food came slowly, dish by dish, it gave us more time to chat and catch up in between so all definitely was not lost. :)

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